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WHERE THE STRESS FALLS

Susan Sontag

Review by Jeff Calder

Every life has an absolute value.

--Susan Sontag

“Whatever your tug of sympathy,” she wrote in 1997, “you have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever you are talking about. In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.”

Sontag has governed her life by this credo, and she has never been silent for very long . “Trip to Hanoi ,” her eyewitness account in 1968, made her a brief, but too elusive target for the crowd who thought the Vietnam War might be a good idea. Later, in the 70s, experiencing cancer firsthand, she produced Illness as Metaphor, revealing in the process the fundamental generosities of spirit that flow through all of her work, like waters which carve caves.

Sontag ’s last decade has perhaps been even more tumultuous. In 1993, she directed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot while under fire “on the ground” in Sarajevo . As a supporter of the principle of “humanitarian intervention” in Bosnia and later Kosovo, she eventually found herself to one side of an acrimonious split on the Left. Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., she survived a vicious polemical assault from a troubled academic named Camile Paglia. Sontag remained neutral in the face of this attack—performed a literary rope-a-dope, really-- and she soon (re)secured her reputation with the 1999 National Book Award for her novel, In America. Of course, like that other great American explainer, Gore Vidal, many consider Sontag to be at her best as an essayist. For them, she has finally delivered a new compilation of 41 pieces published from 1982 to 2001, which is titled, aptly enough, Where The Stress Falls.

Stress is broken into three parts: Reading ; Seeing ; Here and There. The essays in the first deal exclusively with literary concerns. Sontag is an artist for whom national boundaries have long since dissolved, and, in her homage to the Brazilian author Machado de Assis, she questions “Eurocentric notions of world literature”: “Our standards of modernity are a system of flattering illusions, which permit us selectively to colonize the past, as are our ideas of what is provincial, which permit some parts of the world to condescend to all the rest.” Many pieces here eulogize poets and novelists from Central Europe whose books are not very well known in America , such as Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kis and Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. (The work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva is singled out as one long “argument for rapture.”) Of particular interest among the living is W.G. Sebald, author of the highly recommended Rings of Saturn. [Author: Sebald is since deceased.]

Sontag , who was born in 1933, believes that “The reality is, everyone outlives an old self, often more than one, in the course of a reasonably long life.” Almost gone from Stress are the fun days of her famous 1960s collections (Styles of Radical Will, Against Interpretation), with their meditations on science fiction films and the importance of Camp. She reveals as much about herself as her subject in this comment on a 1983 dance production by Lucinda Childs: “She [Childs] has dropped the jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism, and has reached for the sublime.” However, throughout the second section, “Seeing ,” which is dominated by deep examinations of photography (Mapplethorpe), music (Wagner), art, dance and film (Fassbinder), Sontag studies grottos and Bunruku, the Japanese puppet theatre, with a touch of the old playfulness and a new sublimity, as well.

On the other hand, in terms of sheer impact, Where The Stress Falls contains nothing to rival “Fascinatin g Fascism,” her 1976 demolition of the German filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl. Sontag ’s outline of the “fascist aesthetic” ranks as one of the most significant essays by an American writer in the late 20^th Century, and its rude clang will resonate for years to come. Nevertheless, mini-manifestos like “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)” and several commendable thought-statements provide some of the most rewarding moments of this miscellanea.

In “A Century of Cinema,” she celebrates the centenary of the birth of cinema in 1895 with what amounts to a graveside recitation. She was one of the first American thinkers to hail the breakthrough of directors like Jean-Luc Godard, for whom movies were “poetic objects.” The days when such theoretical elevations had access to the mainstream are gone, at least for the time being . Hollywood films “will continue to be astonishingly witless; already the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences…If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love” and fresh cadres of Cinephiles.

“Thirty Years Later,” a new preface for her 1966 Against Interpretation, is, for Sontag, an extraordinary self-examination of her early career that suddenly transmogrifies into a lamentation on the contradictions implicit in the 1960s, a time when much of what seemed “frivolous” in pop culture actually harbored serious intent: “It is not that The Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote—indeed, impose—the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons.”

Along with Christopher Hitchens, Sontag has long challenged the presuppositions of people whose beliefs she is generally thought to share, attacking elements of the Left for being soft on the brutality and cultural mediocrity of Soviet-style regimes during the Cold War. In part, She supported the campaign on Serbia as necessary to preserve the idea of a united, yet “polyphonic” civilization in Europe . In the closing section of this anthology, she condemns the cowardice of “Western Intellectuals” who failed to take a stance against Serb fascism in Bosnia in contrast to an earlier generation that joined against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. And on occasion in Where The Stress Falls, Sontag unleashes a bracing reactionary blast at irritations like interactive bookscreens. “The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library.”

There is plenty of stress falling around the planet these days, and Sontag was anything but silent in the week following the stupefying atrocity of September 11. In her brief commentary in The New Yorker (9. 24.01), she attacked the American media for their “campaign to infantilize the public” by eliding any serious analysis of the situation altogether. This prompted howls from middle-aged tough-guys who, within their sanctuaries at The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post , assailed her with charges of disloyalty. And the real extent of Susan Sontag ’s threat to Homeland Security?: “Politics, the politics of democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. ‘Our country is strong ,’ we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling . Who doubts that America is strong ? But that’s not all America has to be.”

--Jeff Calder

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